High-stakes duel between JFK and Castro played out in South Florida

Army band members play and tanks fire on Fort Lauderdale Beach as part of… (Fort Lauderdale Historical…)

November 21, 2013|By Robert Nolin, Sun Sentinel

In the months leading up to his assassination 50 years ago today, President John F. Kennedy was occupied, as he had been throughout much of his administration, with communist Cuba.

And South Florida was the nexus of the high stakes tug of war between Kennedy and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Troops drilled with landing craft and tanks at Port Everglades. Trains rumbled through Hollywood bearing missiles stacked like white cordwood.

If there was a symbol for Kennedy's shadow war, it was the battle flag of Brigade 2506, the doomed division that stormed the beach at Cuba's Bay of Pigs in April 1961 during a fruitless attempt to unseat Castro.

That banner was brandished by Kennedy in December 1962 in Miami's Orange Bowl. "I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana," the president vowed.

Fifty years later, Kennedy is dead and Castro lives. The silken flag rests behind glass in a quiet museum in Little Havana, testament to a promise and policy derailed by an assassin's shot.

"The bullet that went through the body of President Kennedy ended our dreams of a liberated Cuba," said Bay of Pigs veteran Raul Martinez, 72, of Miami.

"The assassination changed the whole scenario," said Matias Farias of Pembroke Pines, a 74-year-old Bay of Pigs survivor. "It eliminated 90 percent of the opportunity for another invasion."

Historians say the struggle over Cuba defined Kennedy's administration. "The lowest point was the Bay of Pigs and the highest point was the Cuban missile crisis," said David Kilroy, American history professor at Nova Southeastern University.

The missle crisis of October 1962, a showdown over Cuba-based nuclear warheads, brought the world to the cusp of war. Troop convoys, trucks and trains laden with arms and materiel swept into South Florida. Port Everglades became an armed camp, ready to attack or defend by land or sea.

The Soviet Union relented, and withdrew missiles from the communist island. But the Kennedy-Cuba connection continued. Cuban influences even played into later conspiracy theories over who shot the popular president.

Castro was the mastermind in one such theory. A more imaginative one suggests Lee Harvey Oswald, the generally accepted assassin, was a CIA operative who murdered the president because he let the agency take the blame for the Bay of Pigs. Another theory has Cubans, angry over the botched invasion, engineering the assassination.

Many Cubans are still bitter that Kennedy didn't order air support which might have saved the invasion. "Kennedy betrayed the Cuban people," stated one "brigadista," Vicente Blanco, 70, of Miami.

"He let us down big time," said Carl Sudano, 83, of Palm Beach Gardens, an American airman who fought in the Bay of Pigs. When Kennedy was shot, Sudano said, "I shed no tears."

But Bay of Pigs veteran Omelio Sosa, 74, of West Palm Beach, was more forgiving. "Maybe if he lived, he would be true to his promise about returning the flag to a free Cuba," he said.

After the invasion, Kennedy paid Castro a ransom of $53 million in drugs, medical supplies and baby food for the release of some 1,200 captured brigade members. In December 1962, after 20 months' imprisonment, Brigade 2506 survivors greeted the president in the Orange Bowl.

"We needed to support Kennedy, show Kennedy that the brigade thinks that he will send another force," Farias said.

Before a crowd of 40,000, khaki-clad brigade leaders presented Kennedy with their battle flag. He responded with the promise to free their homeland.

"The whole place fell apart in applause and 'vivas.' We trusted him at that moment," Martinez recalled.

"Kennedy, I really think, believed his administration could topple Castro," said Kilroy.

Kennedy bore the flag back to Washington, D.C. He and brother Bobby then initiated Operation Mongoose, in which brigade veterans were inducted into the U.S. military and covertly trained for another Cuban invasion.

But within a year, Kennedy was killed. Operation Mongoose was crippled.

"U.S. officials said it's a new game: 'We don't want to hear any more talk about invasions,' " Farias recounted.

Years passed and disillusionment with Kennedy grew among exiles. South Florida's Cubans embraced the Republican Party, evolving into a national political force. Kilroy cited the Bay of Pigs as a "major starting point" for the political shift.

The Brigade 2506 flag — pale yellow with the blue silhouette of a soldier springing forward with rifle and bayonet — disappeared into the Kennedy Library in Waltham, Mass. Rumors among brigadistas said it was actually in a Pentagon basement.

Colorful Miami attorney Ellis Rubin sued for its return on behalf of Brigade 2506. The government at first refused to relinquish it, then changed course. In 1976, the flag was shipped to Miami in a special jet whose doors could accommodate its 5 1/2-by-6-foot frame.

Today the flag is the centerpiece of the Bay of Pigs Museum in Little Havana, flanked by American and Cuban flags and photos of the invasion's fallen warriors.

Many brigade members doubt it will ever fly over a liberated Cuba.

"It's a lost cause," said Sudano. "It's nothing but the older guys who are carrying the torch and as they slowly and surely die, there goes the flag."

But Sosa hasn't despaired. "You can only hope that someday it will fly in a free Cuba," he said. "Maybe I won't see it."